“But I’m tired of the doll house. I want to play on the rocking horse.”

Alexander’s complaint reached Maria as she crossed the midpoint of the stairs. The creak of the ancient wooden staircase beneath her feet drowned out his next words, and it wasn’t until she approach his bedroom door that she heard him speak again.

Emporium was quiet for a Saturday night, but then, it tended to attract a lot of Espers. Dunno why. Maybe they like the music. Maybe they like that the bar staff don’t ask How’s your day been? as soon as you pull up a stool. Maybe they just like the soft-light ambiance. Emporium wasn’t really my scene, but I didn’t feel as uncomfortable there as most simple, honest folk do.

The docks smelt bad even at the best of times, but as she tottered down the wooden pier on her stupidly high heels, Detective Kitty Salva tried not to pull her face at the foul miasma of rotting fish and blooming algae wafting up from the water below. There were only two ways to smuggle dragons into Yew Nork City, and if they weren’t coming by land, they had to be coming by sea.

Pussycat lay draped over the side of the rowboat, her paw trailing listlessly in the water. Every few minutes a fish would swim up to examine the ripples, only to dart back to the safety of the depths when Pussycat took a swipe.

I like to think of drabble as the baby brother (or sister) of flash fiction. Where a flash fiction may run from a few hundred to a couple of thousand words, a drabble offers a more concise style of telling a story: 100 words or less.

Her gnarled knuckles ache with the pain of age and cold as she directs the brush this way and that across the upright canvas. Darkness is her comfort, her old friend, her nightly blanket. Darkness because eyes clouded by cataracts require no light by which to see.